Digital technologies in higher education: processes, practices, ecologies

This research aims at empirically investigating digitalization processes in the Italian and global higher education. Three intertwined fields are explored to this end: processes, practices, and ecologies. First, I examine the processes of emergence and infiltration of online platforms in the global and Italian higher education. I thus attempt at identifying the origins and patterns of the main digital forms in the global scenario, as well as their promises and epistemologies. The co-shaping between technology and platformisation processes in the Italian case is also reconstructed. Furthermore, I explore the practices accomplished by some professionals (professors, governance actors, and IT specialists) dealing with digital platforms in higher education in Italy. The platforms used at the Sapienza University of Rome, the translation of the idea of information technology in such context, and online teaching during the Covid-19 emergency in Italy are inspected. The third field that I investigate concerns the wider ecologies that the interconnectedness among platforms in higher education performs, and their effects. First, the journey of the idea of interoperability is explored across time and space. In addition, efforts are made to follow interoperability as connectedness-in-action across practices, cultures and connections in the Sapienza digital ecology. In the final remarks, I argue for university teaching as a collective matter, the democratization of university knowledge, higher education as a critical business, and the reappropriation of black boxes in policy and practice. Lastly, I attempt at envisaging ecological futures for higher education. In order to tackle these issues, I interconnect three strands of literature. First, I adopt a Science and Technology Studies sensitivity, i.e. a processual, relational and ecological viewpoint that is receptive to the relationships among entities. Furthermore, I embrace a practice-based approach, inasmuch I consider knowledge as an emerging and situated fact, and organizations as textures of practices in constant performance. Finally, I use aspects of critical policy sociology of education, as I am interested in unpacking how values and agendas prescribed by (assemblages of) actors become global standards. The research is conducted through 31 interviews (with professors, IT specialists, and governance actors), digital ethnography, and the collection of subjective diaries by students and professors.